The Angry Bear

The Angry Bear #9: My Life On Screen

I put my life in the hands of medical professionals. I'm glad at least one of them was a gamer.

I put my life in a gamer's hands this week.

I mean that literally. I've spent the last three days in the hospital recovering from stomach surgery that my doctor described as "textbook." I'm home now where I'll be convalescing for the next week but I'm continually amazed that I live in a time where the field of surgery has advanced to the point where I can now recover from having my organs sliced open in two weeks rather than six months. Here's the thing though -- I think my doctor might have been wrong. I don't believe my surgery was "textbook." I think it might have been more "game manual."

My vision of surgery and the medical field in general is heavily influenced by television and popular media, as I'm sure is true for everybody who doesn't actually work in the field. On TV and in the movies, surgery is always a dramatic crisis where the camera focuses more on the blood and the faces and dialogue of those involved than the machines or the technology. I was therefore unprepared for the experience of getting wheeled into the operating theater. In the 10 minutes or so I was awake on the table while the doctors attached monitors to my body I looked around the room. What struck me was the number of HDTV monitors there were. There were at least a dozen or so arrayed around the table and hanging from the ceiling. They were big ones too, at least 35-inchers.

My surgery, you see was going to be done "laprocopically". That means that to avoid having to actually cut me open, the doctor would be inserting pinhole cameras into my body along with remote-controlled instruments in order to do the actually cutting and suturing. The reason for all the screens was that my surgeon would most likely never actually look at me during the procedure. He'd have his eyes glued to the screen and my life depended on his ability to be able to read the information coming off it and remotely manipulate the instruments he was seeing. In other words, my future health depended on a real-life game of Trauma Center.

As I am an incurable wiseass, my comment to the attending operating room staff upon seeing all of those screens was to make a smart remark. When one of the staff asked me, "Are you okay?" as the first wave of muscle relaxant hit, my comment was, "Sure. I was just looking at all these screens and wondering whether you guys ever play Grand Theft Auto in here?" Without missing a beat he replied, "We used to. We've moved on to Resident Evil 5 after hours." This is not a comment that gets made by someone who gets their gaming information from the mainstream media. At least one of my operating room staff was a gamer.